Five Months after the Accident
AUGUST 1983
It has been three days since Kat left and returned to their previous life, unwittingly weaving herself back into all their old entanglements and dangers.
Jude had noticed the missing items from the curio cabinet, including the photographs of the carousel and the fake parents, and concluded that Kat had gone in search of their past. Verona was the type of person who longed to be found, and Kat the type to persist until she found her.
She had dialed Verona’s phone number and was so shocked to hear Kat’s singsong hello that she could say nothing in response. For ten seconds there was silence, and then her sister spoke with devastating calm: “Jude, I told you I do not want to be found.” Click. When she tried again the next day, a mechanical recording informed her that the number had been disconnected.
Verona is no doubt rewriting history into a narrative Kat will believe, something lighthearted and harmless, without any hint of the events that led them to escape.
Jude hides behind the knobby trunk of an old oak tree, a knife in her pocket, a fist pressed against her heart. She can’t look at the house, but she must. She can’t approach it, but she must. She has no idea how she is going to rescue Kat and restart their lives yet again, but she must.
She forces herself to peer around the tree and confront the old house, which remains just as ominous to her as the now-empty row homes in the city; it is the place where she last saw her father, bloody in the doorway, and where Verona and King Bash and the RonDon started The Plan, and where she and Kat had abandoned their childhood, never to recover it again. At this hour, just before midnight, the ivy that wraps around its shingled facade looks more constricting than cozy; and the stone roof, with its chipped and missing shingles, is a murderer’s row of crooked teeth; and the dueling dormer windows that squint happily in daylight have become hooded eyes in a vacant face.
Reject and release.
She thinks about the farmhouse in Harmony, the bloodied rabbit in the driveway, the strangers behind the door. She thinks of the visit she made to Harmony while her sister was in the hospital, a weekend of fevered reconnaissance, visiting the ice cream shop and memorizing landmarks and gathering all the minutia that might constitute a life. She’d borrowed as much of Verona’s childhood as she could—the actual house where their mother grew up, the park where she’d played—and used fiction to color in the rest. She wishes now that she’d had more time, more foresight. She wishes she’d picked a town in California or Idaho or along the coast of Florida, somewhere out of Kat’s reach, a place too far for secret library visits, for inquiries about house records and deeds. The details Jude had gathered to make their history sound true succeeded only in exposing each lovely, curated lie. She’d needed so badly for Kat to believe, and to transfer that belief somehow, through twin magic, to herself.
Her real childhood home gazes back at her, waiting, daring her. It is time.
She enumerates her actions, divorcing them from the task at hand, rendering them less than the sum of their parts. She is touching the wrought iron gate, which is merely a gate. She is unlatching the lock, which is just a lock. The swish of her feet through the grass is just a pleasant, everyday sound. She approaches the house, which is just a house, it really, really, is just a house, a house where her sister believes she is safe. There is the window of the bedroom they’d shared before Verona dropped them off in the city, leaving them with monsters who called themselves kings. A soft yellow light pushes through the glass, and Jude senses her sister moving behind it.
She stays close to the hedges, aligning herself flush against the side of the house, allowing her body to be absorbed in the shadows of other things. Her pocket flashlight illuminates a path of pebbles weaving along potted plants and rose bushes. She scoops up a handful of them, and pelts one at the window. And another and another.
She sees the outline of her sister’s head. The window creaks as Kat opens it.
“Kat!” Jude whisper-screams. “Please come down and listen to me! You’re not safe there! Ehs si yingly ot ouy!” She is lying to you. “I only lied to protect you! Okol ni het des—”
She stops before finishing the sentence. From somewhere along the other side of the yard comes a growl, low and vicious. The growl climbs an octave, changing shape, and finalizes itself as a bark—a bark with desperate urgency, signaling an imminent attack.
A dog.
For one interminable second Jude sees her sister’s face, Kat’s features coming into sharp focus, her eyes empty of any connection.
Jude begins to run.
The dog bounds toward her; she senses its heat at her heels. She thinks of her switchblade. She will turn and impale its throat if she feels the pinch of its teeth. It lunges, its huge jaws clamping at air, and she sprints faster and faster until she crashes though the back fence, latching it behind her just in time. Then comes the bang of the dog’s thick body against the wood, its snarling now infused with a disappointed whine, dense stalactites of drool wetting the ground.
Jude sprawls across the grass, waiting for her breath to return, the image of her sister’s vacant eyes imprinted on her mind. When she glances back she sees that the house has snuffed out every light, gathering its darkness within.